Trapped in 'Black Russia' Part 7

Nothing has happened yet. We have our meals brought to us by Antosha, who tries to comfort us with extra large pickled cuc.u.mbers and portions of sour cream. We are allowed to send Panna Lolla downtown for cigarettes and books from the circulating library. Thank Heaven for books! With our nerves stretched to the snapping-point and a pinwheel of thoughts everlastingly spinning round in our heads, I think we should go mad except for books. It is very hot, but my body is always cool and damp, because I can't eat much, I suppose, and lie on a _chaise longue_ motionless all day long. I can feel myself growing weak, and there is nothing to do but sit and wait.

Marie and I go over and over the whole thing, and finish at the point where we began. "But why?" We think it may be because Marie came to Bulgaria to visit me and brought me back here, and now we want to leave Russia together. The papers say that Bulgaria already has German officers over her troops. But I can't believe it. She is too independent. They say that she will certainly go with the Central Powers. That, too, is inconceivable. Perhaps, however, if it is true, and already known by the Russian authorities, the secret service is suspicious of our going back there, and of Marie's intention of sailing home from Dedeagatch, via Greece. What else could it be? How this uncertainty maddens us! Yet we are thankful for every day that pa.s.ses and leaves us together. What will happen when they translate my letter?

_Boje moy!_ I hear a step outside the door, and my heart simply ceases to beat.

Pan Tchedesky to-day tiptoed into our room when the spy was having his lunch. He whispered to us that he had seen the English Consul, Mr.

Douglas, and told him about our case. He begged us not to be discouraged, and to eat. He said that he almost wept when he saw our plates come back to the kitchen, untouched. How flabby and livid he looked, his vague, blurred eyes watery with tears! Yet we could have embraced him. He is the only person who has spoken to us.

The sun is golden on the old convent wall across the street. The convent is empty during the summer. Only the richest Court ladies send their daughters there to be educated, and the Dowager Empress visits them when she pa.s.ses through Kiev. The trees in the garden are gold and green in the late afternoon sun. A little bell tinkles musically.

Below in the street some pa.s.sing soldiers are singing. How fresh and strong and beautiful their untrained voices are. I wonder if they are off to the front, for each one carries a pack and a little tea-kettle swung on his back and a wooden spoon stuck along the side of his leg in his boot. Where will they be sent? Up north, to try and stem the German advance? To Riga? Where? The Germans are still advancing. Something is wrong somewhere. And still soldiers go to the front, singing. They are thrown into the breach. I can't help but think of the fields of Russian dead, unburied. Who has a chance to bury the dead on a retreat? There is nothing "decent" in it. Yet they say the retreat is "orderly." I wonder what that means?

At night when I try to sleep, I see the map of Russia as if it was printed on my eyeb.a.l.l.s. It is so big and black with a thin red line of fire eating into it. America seems millions of miles away. I wish I could touch you just for a minute. If I could only feel your arms about me for one moment. The only way is not to think beyond this room and this minute.

RUTH.

_August._

_Dearests:--_

Peter is here. Last night, about nine o'clock the door opened and he rushed into the room. I got to my feet on impulse, and then tried to brace myself and control my disordered reason, for, of course, I believed myself delirious. He stopped by the door long enough to throw down his suitcase, and in that instant I struggled fiercely to disbelieve my eyes. I was fighting myself. My legs trembled. But when I fell, his arms were around me, supporting me.

"Is it you? Is it you?" I don't know whether I said the words out loud or not, but I remember feeling the muscle in Peter's shoulder and wondering if I could have gone out of my head as much as _that_.

"What on earth has happened to you two?" he said at last.

"Let me sit down," I said, feeling suddenly very sick and faint, and a black spot in front of my eyes expanded all at once and shut out the swaying room.

"Why didn't you come to Bucharest?" he asked again.

"How white and thin you are. Isn't he, Marie?" I observed, the blackness gone from my eyes.

"Please answer me. What is the matter? You both look sick."

"We are under arrest for espionage," Marie and I suddenly burst out in chorus, and we both began talking as fast and as loud as we could.

"That's all right. I'll fix things for you," Peter rea.s.sured us when we stopped at last, out of breath. I suddenly wanted to hide him so they wouldn't get him as well as ourselves. He was so self-confident. What did _he_ know of how things happened over here? He was talking and acting like a rational human being, which was sure proof he was in no position to cope with the Russian Secret Service. I felt a frantic desire to get him out of the room and make him promise that on no account would he admit he knew us.

"You must go at once," I whispered. "There's a spy at the door. If he sees you, they'll arrest you, too. Please go, go at once." And I tried to push him away.

"You poor things," he said, laughing. "There's no need to be frightened like this. Of course I won't go. Why should they arrest me?"

"Why should they have arrested us? Oh, you _don't_ know." My teeth were chattering.

"Now, look here," he said seriously. "You've been alone and scared, and I'm sure you haven't eaten anything for days. Now, don't think about this any more. I'll get you out in no time. Have you a cigarette, anybody?"

I sat back, and my body stopped shaking. Everything seemed very still. I had the distinct thought, "What is to come, will come," and I drew a deep breath that seemed to come from my toes. It was enough Peter was here, after all.

We talked till three in the morning. Peter had gone to Bucharest to meet us, and when we didn't arrive, he took the first train to Kiev. I began to believe in his bodily presence. Before he left to go back to his hotel, I had regained my conviction he was a match for even the Russian Secret Service.

Can you imagine how we feel to-day? We go tottering round the room, taking things up and putting them down again, in a nervous anxiety to _do_ something. We chirp the rag-times popular in America two years ago.

We feel as though we were just recovering from a sickness, with a pleasant bodily weakness like a convalescent's in the springtime. Peter brought me a bunch of red roses when he came over this morning. I am writing this while he is seeing Mr. Douglas, the English Consul.

So much love to you from

RUTH.

_September._

_Darlingest ones:--_

It has been three weeks since our arrest, and to-day is the first time we have been allowed to leave the room and go outdoors. We are still under house-arrest, but we can go out in the garden, while two soldiers guard the entrance. Isn't it ludicrous? A gendarme came last night and announced with ponderous importance that we were to be permitted the liberty of the garden if we gave our word of honor not to try to escape.

We signed two red-sealed doc.u.ments, and so we can go into the garden while two soldiers with bayonets look to it that we don't go any farther.

Peter had to bully me into leaving my room this afternoon. I didn't want to get healthy. I had grown so used to the proportions of our rooms I hated to make the effort to adjust myself to any others. But Peter came back from his daily round of visits to the English Consul, and the Army Headquarters, and the office of Kiev's civil governor, and produced from his coat-pocket a rubber ball. We were to play ball out in the garden, he said. So, after some persuasion Marie and I went out into the garden with him. How weak I was. My legs trembled going downstairs, and I was exhausted when I reached the benches in the garden.

Janchu, seeing us, ran up joyfully and took his mother by the hand.

"This is my mother," he said in Polish, looking around proudly at the other children who were playing there.

Every one looked at us curiously. A head appeared at every window in the big stone apartment house. I saw the two women spies who had undressed us. They were evidently employed as servants in some family, for one was ironing and the other fixing a roast for the oven. They, too, looked out at us. I felt hot and indignant and, yes, ashamed as though I had been guilty. I wanted to hide. I felt inadequate to life. People were too much for me. People--people, the living and the dead. What a weight of life! I could hardly control my tears. Weakness, I suppose, for the soles of my feet and my fingertips hurt me as though my nerves were bared to the touch.

I looked up over the garden-wall. The tree-tops were yellow. While we had been locked in our room, the season had changed. Autumn was upon us.

I s.h.i.+vered. There was a lavender mist over the city dimming the radiance of the gold and silver church domes. How beautiful Kiev was! The church-bells were so mellow-toned; and the children's shrill laughter and cries as they played in the garden. But it tired me. Every impression seemed to bruise me.

Peter bought some little Polish cakes, and we had hot tea to cheer us up--three and four gla.s.ses of tea.

Good-night. Sometimes, when I think of you, I don't see all of you, but instead a particular gesture, or I hear an inflection of voice that is too familiar to be borne. Now I see mother's hands and they are beautiful.

RUTH.

_September._

_Dearests:--_

Every day now we go out into the garden. We play ball and play tag in the wind to get warm.

There is a private hospital at one end of our apartment house, supported by a wealthy Polish woman. Two or three times a week she visits the patients, young officers who go out into the garden with her and kiss her hand and talk and flirt. She sits on a garden-bench surrounded by her young men, a big woman in black, with a long black veil, talking vivaciously, using her hands in quick, expressive gestures, patting their cheeks, leaning forward to give their hands an impulsive squeeze.

When she laughs, which is often, the black line of a mustache on her upper lip makes the white of her teeth whiter still. The days when she isn't there, the convalescents flirt with the nurses. There is nothing horrible about this hospital. The patients are only slightly wounded, and wear becoming bathrobes when they lounge round.

The window-ledges of the rooms are gay with flowers. Almost always a phonograph is going, "Carmen," or "Onegin," or "Pagliacci." Sometimes, Peter and I one-step to the music on the pavement outside, and the officers and nurses crowd to the windows and clap and cry, "Encore!"

Often, after sundown, when the children have gone indoors, and we go out for a walk before dinner, we see a patient with a bandage around his head, perhaps, but both arms well enough to be clasping a pretty nurse in them. They laugh and we laugh. There is no cynicism about it. It's bigger than that, it seems to me.

Into the garden come many street musicians. They play and sing, and showers of kopecks rain down from the windows. Two little girls came a few days ago. They were Tziganes, barefooted, with gay petticoats and flowered shawls and dangling earrings. Their dark hair was short and curly. One of the children played a _balalaika_ and sang in a broken, mournful voice that did not at all belong to her age. The other--who wore the prettiest dress, yellow, with a green and purple shawl--danced like a little marionette on a string, not an expression in her pointed, brown face, but every now and then accelerating the pace of her dance, and giving sharp, high cries. Then, suddenly, they stopped in the middle of a measure, and held out their ap.r.o.ns for money. A window on the ground floor opened and a very pretty woman leaned out. I have seen her many times. She is Polish, the daughter of a concierge, and now the mistress of a young Cossack, who is leaving shortly for the front. She has heavy, pale-yellow hair, wound around her head in thick braids, and she wears pearls, opaque like her skin. She beckoned the little girls into her room. They went eagerly. Soon I heard them singing there.

When we were with Dr. ----, from the Red Cross hospital this afternoon, a soldier came up to us and saluted. He was a miserable-looking creature, in a uniform too big for him. His face was unshaven, his beard gray and spa.r.s.e, and his eyes red and blinking and full of pain. He slouched away again in a moment, his eyes staring down at the sidewalk under his feet.